WASHINGTON—You can be black. You can be candid about the pain of race in America. You can be the president of the United States.

But if you’re Barack Obama, combining each of those conditions at the same time has been the electrified third rail of his historic presidency.

America’s first ever African-American leader built two victories on inclusivity: “hope and change” in the star-struck fall of 2008, which gave way to a much messier campaign in 2012 seized with class, not race, when No-Drama Obama claimed Mitt Romney’s 47 per cent — and many others besides — with colour-blind messaging in what proved to be a cakewalk.

Then came Friday afternoon. After a week of mounting pressure to offer more than a written statement on last week’s George Zimmerman acquittal, Obama stepped up with 20 stunning, unscripted minutes on race.

“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” said Obama, not just acknowledging but slaying the elephant in the room.

A gape-jawed White House press corps sat astonished as Obama, himself the product of a biracial family — a black father from Kenya, a white mother from Kansas — described, as never before, what it feels like inside young, black male skin.

Time changes but history doesn’t. And it is “inescapable” that African-Americans will see the scot-free exoneration of Zimmerman in the shooting death of a Skittles-toting Florida teen through the lens of their own collective experience.

“There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me,” said Obama.

“There are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator.

“There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

“And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.”

Obama said African-Americans are “not naïve in understanding that, statistically, somebody like Trayvon Martin was more likely to be shot be a peer than he was by somebody else.

“But they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it and that context is being denied. And that all contributes, I think, to a sense that if they feel that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been very different,” he said.

Obama maintained remarkable composure as he talked through the Kryptonite. And all on the fly, with no teleprompter in sight. And as he pivoted from a plea for understanding to possible destinations for the national angst, it must be said, hope was conspicuous in its absence.

There may be areas worthy of focus but don’t expect the rollout of a five-point plan, said Obama. No “grand, new federal program” is likely to hit the mark. The notion of convening a national “conversation on race,” he said, is likely to end up “stilted and politicized,” with people “locked into the positions they already have.”

That doesn’t mean Americans can’t “examine some state and local laws,” like the Stand Your Ground legislation in 22 states that favours gun-holders in violent confrontations, he said. Or work to improve efforts to “bolster and reinforce young African American boys … to give them a sense their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them.”

And it doesn’t mean families, churches and workplaces can’t embrace an effort to be a “little more honest” in asking the question: “Am I judging people as much as I can, based on not the colour of their skin, but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy,” said Obama.

If the furious conservative backlash to his remarks underway on social media even before he had finished speaking wasn’t enough, Obama made it clear he sees the next phase of racial change in America coming at a glacial, generational pace.

“Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. It doesn’t mean we’re in a post-racial society. It doesn’t mean that racism is eliminated,” he said.

“But when I talk to (daughters) Malia and Sasha, and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they’re better than we are, they’re better than we were, on these issues.”

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